Happy Summer Solstice!
I will be back to posting here about 1-2 times a week through the fall. Looking ahead, here’s a preview of what I’m working on right now.
For those of you above the equator: I hope you will be able to squeeze some of my new posts into your summer reading plans. For my friends Down Under and in South America: only a few more months until Spring. So, stay warm, and keep reading my posts!
As ever, if you are enjoying the Horizontal Fault, please do share it with your friends and colleagues.
Thank you again for your very supportive emails! I am hoping to hit 1000 readers by December 31st, so please spread the word!
And, in case you missed anything, here are my posts for January through May.
Orchestrated Chaos
In March, I updated an essay I wrote in 2004 for the LA Forum about the decades-long effort to redevelop Bunker Hill and Grand Avenue and the topping out of Frank Gehry’s towers on Grand Avenue across the street from Disney Concert Hall.
In another recent post, I pointed us back to the California Plaza design-development competition, an effort that pitted Canadian architect Arthur Erickson against a hometown ‘supergroup’ led by planner Harvey S. Perloff, Dean of the School of Architecture at UCLA, and architect Charles Moore, UCLA’s then Architecture chairman.
This July, I will post an illustrated essay about another face-off, staged a half-decade ago, between a team of 15 mostly Los Angeles-based architects that I assembled and led (while I was the Design Principal for AECOM’s Los Angeles office) and the Swiss superstars Herzog & de Meuron.
Black Mirror: Vitrified Sand
One of my favorite buildings in Los Angeles isn’t particularly well known or well situated.
It is a black, 12-story monolithic office block located near the offramp at the 405 and 105 freeways near LAX.
If you know the area, it is at the bottom of La Cienega Avenue, at the intersection of the Imperial Highway in the Lennox neighborhood.
I don’t yet know who designed it, but I will be writing about The La Cienega Building and why, more generally, I am so fascinated by reflective glass curtain walls.
More Whatever Happened to LA?
In the mid-2000s, I co-curated an exhibition at SCI-Arc with Jeffrey Inaba about architecture and urban design created in Los Angeles between 1970 in 1990.
The exhibition highlighted Frederick Fisher, Hodgetts and Fung, Coy Howard, Frank Israel, Koning Eizenberg, Ray Kappe, Anthony J. Lumsden, Moore Ruble Yudell, Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss, Cesar Pelli, Glen Small, and Studioworks.
I will be posting further interviews I recorded in the spring of 2005, selecting those boot-legged writings and the original catalog essay with a new epilogue.
Next is a conversation with Koning Eizenberg, an interview with Michael Rotondi, and a lost essay about LA by the late Michael Sorkin.
Other posts, in the works, in no particular order
Freeloading
Kazimir Malevich stated something to the effect that “…an artist is under the obligation to be a free creator, but not a freeloader.”
I tend to disagree. By examining the fraught relationship between contemporary art and architecture, I'm hoping to prove Malevich wrong.
We’ll see how that goes.
Design for Dignity II.
I provided closing remarks for the 2017 follow-up to the first AIA|LA Design for Dignity forum.
I will be editing those remarks and posting them on tHF this summer with some additional thoughts about the ongoing homelessness crisis in Southern California.
Paul Rudolph: Are you Talking to Me?
In 2011 I presented a talk about Paul Rudolph at the Future of History conference at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. My talk was titled Rudolph Retconned: a Parallel Post Modern Project. It was a follow-up to another paper about Rudolph I presented at the Flip your Field Conference at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 2010. I'll be editing both pieces and posting them here.
Corporate Architecture
At some point this summer or fall, I will be trying to make sense of my fascination with corporate American architecture by ruminating a little about my stints in large-scale, international corporate commercial offices like AECOM, Jerde, and Gensler.
A Poem for Zaha
I wrote a poem published in Fluid Totality, a book to commemorate her Professorship at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria (or Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien, informally Die Angewandte.) I will post it here with some notes about my fond memories of Dame Zaha.
Chimera
As I have recently been thinking and writing about my identity and family history, in parallel, I have found it increasingly harder and harder to assign a specific, authentic form of cultural identity to my own work, which not coincidentally, I thought might be important to do, at midlife.
I studied architecture in Australia, and I have a passport, but I can’t exactly call myself an Australian architect.
My parents were raised in Central America and Eastern Europe, but I don't call myself a Latin American or European architect for obvious reasons.
While I have spent most of my professional life working in Los Angeles or New York, I have never felt like an insider in either city, more of a stranger on either coast.
So, I have decided that because I am not sure that I know how to specifically connect my identity to my architectural interests, for the moment, I plan to abandon thinking about the problem until I have a better way of discussing it.
And to do that, one thing I may attempt to do is to write about a mythical creature made of many weird parts, the Chimera, and architecture and see where that gets me.
Think Small, Part 2.
I have been thinking lately about small urban things, specifically little houses, smaller lots, small reclaimed public spaces, and the promise they collectively hold to transform Los Angeles for the better.
This post will be a follow-up to an essay I revised here in February.
Big City is No Longer Modern
One of the first essays I published after graduate school was about Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City project. I wrote the essay for a class with my professor Detlef Mertens, and it was published in 1999 in Daidalos, then edited by Bart Lootsma.
I will post it here with some updated observations on Frank Lloyd Wright's urban design projects.
Free
In 2017 I attempted to establish an independent, tuition-free, and “horizontal” school of architecture. Later this year, I will be posting a conversation with my friend Portuguese-French artist, architect, and designer Didier Faustino about that experiment. Our discussion was published, in French, in Architectures Cree. I will be translating the conversation and posting it here, and I will attempt to provide some closing comments about my efforts to start a school of architecture and why I will probably never do that again.
And other things that pop into my head….
There are a few other things I'd like to write about this summer.
First, I will write a review of OMA’s first large-scale public building in Los Angeles, an extension to the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Koreatown.
I've also been meaning to dig up and rewrite a paper I presented in 2002 at the 8th Baltic Triennial of International Art at the Contemporary Art Centre, in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2006. That talk was about parallel forms of modern city planning, created under radically different political systems but producing similar physical conditions. Specifically, I examined new ‘Science Cities’ in the former Soviet Union and Southern California, comparing the master plans for UC Irvine, California, and Novosibirsk.
I will keep publishing photographs from 101 Stucco Façades, a self-published booklet.
Lastly, if you got this far, here is a photo of the beautiful solid wood model of the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, designed by Lumsden for Daniel, Mann, Johnson, and Mendenhall and shown as part of an exhibition that I co-curated at SCI-Arc in 2005.
The plant is one of four wastewater treatment plants operated by the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation, two of which were designed by Lumsden while at DMJM. He was also responsible for the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant near LAX.